I’ve long planned to read Petraeus’ praised counterinsurgency manual, but I just haven’t done it yet. With that said, I openly wonder what COIN orthodoxy says about suicide bombers.

Presumably, by ingratiating yourself with the local populace and ultimately gaining their trust, you will prevent insurgent groups from getting succour from an embittered population which resents your presence in the country. Using Mao’s famous metaphor for insurgent armies being fish swimming through the water of the general populace, you drain the water so the fish can’t swim.

Sounds good when applied to mobile guerilla bands who value their own lives and who occasionally fight real battles, however asymmetrical. But it sounds much less applicable to suicide bombers who have decided to forfeit their lives in advance and who don’t need a vast network of support to carry out their outrage.

I suppose one could hope that a sympathetic population will be able to rat out bomb-making nests and could point out suspicious activity to the authorities before an attack takes place. But the sheer susceptibility of even the most advanced, coherent societies such as ours to the irrational attacks of determined psychopaths suggests to me that past a certain population density, the full cooperation of a sympathetic population becomes much less effective than we’d like to believe.

I mean, what can we possibly do about acts such as these?

Horrible:

A 13-year-old boy wearing an explosives-packed vest blew himself up Sunday among a group of tribal leaders in the western province of Anbar, becoming one of the youngest suicide bombers since the U.S.-led invasion, Iraqi police said.

Doesn’t look like the kid had much of a future in this world:

Faiyadh said the boy was the son of one of the five most-wanted leaders of al-Qaeda in Iraq, a Sunni insurgent group that U.S. officials say is led by foreigners.

A child grows up in that kind of environment, is fed revolutionary dogma from an early age, and is therefore easily convinced to die for a cause. Same goes for the parent: once you cross that threshold where the revolutionary goal is everything, you’d sacrifice your own child to achieve it. This is not to justify anything, just a gut check against the tendency to throw up one’s hands in disbelief and plaintively bleat, “What kind of animal would do such a thing?” This is old hat insurgent tactic—beastly but historically unremarkable.

That said, all I can do is hope that somehow, through some turn of events, Al Qaeda in Iraq becomes utterly discredited as an organization and spectacularly and demonstrably fails in all its goals, with the father of this boy ending up in an Iraqi jail, where he endures a long and unpleasant life punctuated by severe beatings, between which he’s forced to ponder the senseless waste he brought about today.